Super El Niño and climate changeThese two images compare sea surface heights during the two most rec

Super El Niño and climate changeThese two images compare sea surface heights during the two most recent “Super El Niño” events. El Niño is driven by a pool of warm water in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, leading to these high surface heights and throwing a wrench into the planet’s machinery. El Niño weather patterns are extremely disruptive globally; places that rely on lots of rain get none, areas that get little rain flood, oceans are extra warm damaging coral reefs, and things are just very different from what everyone is used to.The two strongest El Niño events on record have occurred during the last 20 years. As the world continues to warm, it would be extremely helpful to have predictions of how El Niño events will change; more and stronger El Niño events will require greater adaptation and expense from people who rely on a normal weather pattern.Much of the community who works on climate science has long since moved past understanding the basic physics that dominates the debate in public and is instead working on what the response of the planet will actually be and how to adapt to or avoid those consequences. A new study just published in Nature Climate Change by scientists at the Ocean University of China and Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology applied calibrated computer models to address the question of Super El Niño event frequency.They define the strength of an El Niño event based on the amount of precipitation that occurs in the East-Central Pacific, in the area with high sea levels in these 2 images. They then allow the CO2 increase allowed under the Paris Agreement, and calculate the end effects on El Niño.Although the system is complicated and there are many feedbacks in the ocean that produce scatter, the result from more than a dozen models is fairly straightforward. As right now, in both the models and real world, Super El Niño events occur about once every 20 years (1983 would meet this standard also). However, if temperature rises by 1.5°C, a standard more strict than the one adopted in the Paris agreement, the rate of super El Niño events will double and the intensity of the strongest El Niño events will increase by about 50%. Using the Paris standard of 2°C of warming leads to an even greater increase in super El Niño frequency, with a 1982/83 level event or stronger every 7 years.The 1982 El Niño was associated with billions of dollars of economic losses worldwide and the 1997 El Niño was associated with tens of billions. Even if the Paris agreement standards are met, El Niño events of this frequency will leave behind a very different world a century from now.-JBBImage credit: NASAhttps://go.nasa.gov/1JKGCLWOriginal paper:http://go.nature.com/2vG14RG -- source link

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